Differentiate your MSP from the Competition

How to differentiate your MSP

The habit of highly effective MSPs

At OnPage, we spend a lot of time speaking to MSPs and learning about the growth in IT services. There is an increasing realization by businesses that having the right firewall, endpoint security and monitoring tools is not a job that small businesses can or should attempt to accomplish on their own. These small and medium businesses need the advice and counsel of an experienced technology provider.

Important to note as well though is that as the potential for profit increases, so will the potential for competition. Where there is profit, there is competition. And if all MSPs are providing a similar package of goods, how can an MSP differentiate themselves?

How to differentiate your MSP

OnPage recently visited IT Nation in Orlando. It was a great conference that allowed us the chance to talk to a number of clients as well as the chance to see the various technologies being used by the industry. To some extent, the numerous security offerings and marketing strategies that were on display at IT Nation, if implemented, could have the potential to differentiate an MSP’s ability to market themselves. Indeed, if implemented, the many cybersecurity methods on display could improve an MSPs ability to stay on top of intrusions.

However, at OnPage, we are more of the mind that a key level of differentiation is through the service the MSP provides:

Giving customers the right tools along with top-notch tech support, builds trust and ensures a long-lasting business relationship.

What better way to differentiate your offerings than with top-notch support? Many MSPs are guilty of promising a particular service but failing to follow through either on providing the technology they promised or the responsiveness they said they could give. At the end of the day, customers want to know that if something breaks, their MSP can fix it. If an alert comes in after hours, their MSP will respond to the notification.

Where as many MSPs don’t provide service past 5pm, those that do are already differentiating themselves. And if you are going to provide evening and late night support, you might as well do it right.

OnPage helps differentiate your MSP

We spoke with two of our MSP clients – Cygnus Systems and Advanced Network Products (ANP)– at IT Nation and they spoke about how OnPage’s persistent alerting platform was key to enabling them to maintain their SLAs with customers. By using OnPage, Cygnus and ANP were able to make sure that alerts didn’t fall through the cracks and leave client needs unattended.

For Cygnus and ANP, OnPage differentiated their product offerings by ensuring that whenever an after-hours alert occurred, the IT team was immediately notified of the problem. Furthermore, if the on-call engineer was not available, an escalation occurred that alerted the next engineer on-call. No more missed calls. No more missed opportunities to provide top-notch service to customers.

By using OnPage’s cloud-based, secure messaging service, all MSPs are able to ensure that they:

Receive persistent, secure round-trip messages and alerts to their mobile devices
Avoid fragmented communication and inefficient incident resolution
Route messages via a flexible escalation workflow and complete audit trail
Dispatch alerts and receive responses via your current RMM or Service Ticket system
Receive real-Time ticket & SLA update

Enabling these features will ensure that in addition to providing superlative technological insights to customers, MSPs can also provide customers with prompt service that not only impresses them but also will save the client money.